14 May 2018 4:41 PM

A Defence of Whataboutery. What about the Belhaj Case? What about Erdogan's Turkey?

I thought it was time to write a small article in defence of ‘Whataboutery’, also known as ‘Whataboutism’ or ‘Tu Quoque’ (Thou also [dost this thing]’)

I am surprised by how easily some people are persuaded that a point is wrong when it is dismissed as ‘Whataboutism’. Why, when the person making the case is claiming a moral fault, is it not legitimate to point out that he himself has the same fault?

The Bible is pretty clear on this.

IN The Gospel according to St Matthew Chapter 7, vv 3-5, Our Lord says : ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ‘Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.’

The same metaphor appears in almost identical words in the Gospel according to St Luke, vv 41-2 . It seems odd, when moralising in a society whose morals are supposed to be Christian (indeed, on what other basis can we approve or disapprove of any action?), to classify the preaching of Jesus Christ as either a fallacy or as ‘whataboutery’.

The term ‘whataboutism’ seems to have first appeared in the Cold War, when the USSR might point to the American treatment of the black minority there, when attacked for being a police state with labour camps.

But this was feeble. The two things are not the same. Certainly the USA is very far from being a perfect society, and its treatment of African-Americans has been ( and to some extent remains) highly unsatisfactory.

But this simply wasn’t comparable with the USSR’s system of censorship, repression and political trials. What’s more, anyone who knows anything about Russia knows that ethnic bigotry is very common in Russia, generally directed against the nearest available targets, Central Asians, Chechens and peoples from beyond the Caucasus, but liberally applied to anyone with a dark skin from any part of the planet.

The Soviet propaganda was more effective when it responded to complaints of Soviet repression in the satellite states of eastern Europe by noting that the USA did not readily tolerate governments hostile to it in Latin America. But there were differences even here. In fact, since the days of the Marsahll Plan in the 1940s, a fundamentally free-market and politically conservative USA had often allied with social democratic governments in Western Europe, despite not liking their internal policies very much. The USSR, except in its very late stages when it tolerated Hungary’s semi-capitalist ‘goulash communism’, demanded Communist Party rule in theory and practice.

In general the USR’s propaganda, and the arguments of its apologists in the West, could rightly be dismissed as ‘false equivalence of opposites’. There were similarities between the superpowers, but they were trivial, whereas there were differences, and they were fundamental.

So now let us turn to the new bout of alleged ‘Whataboutery’. I am myself struck by the profound similarities between Russian intervention in Syria, and Russia’s use of airpower against Islamist urban guerrillas in Aleppo, and Western intervention in Iraq and the sue of western airpower against Islamist urban guerrillas in Mosul.

I pointed this out a couple of years ago, in conversation with Christina Lamb, on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. Ms Lamb scoffed, but I have never bene able to see why she did. The main difference between the two events is not material. In both cases the Islamists were using the population as hostages in dense built-up areas; in both cases the major outside powers eventually sued heavyweight airpower to crush them, with substantial civilian casualties. Nobody disputes that these attacks happened, or that innocent people died in them. But, as I’ve pointed out here, the quantity and tone of the reports on Aleppo have been quite different from those of the reports on Mosul.

But in Russia’s case, media, ‘NGOs’ and diplomats accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals, etc (I have seen zero proof of this deliberate targeting, for which you would need access to the orders given to the pilots, it seems to me) . No such charges (quite rightly) were made against US British or other coalition air forces.

This isn’t false equivalence of opposites. This is false opposition of equivalents.

I mention this by way of introduction to three points I wish to make about today. The first is the story of Abdel Hakim Belhaj (or Belhadj, if you prefer, I don’t mind). Britain now admits helping in an operation in which this man was kidnapped by the CIA , along with his wife, held in a secret prison before being flown in chains to Libya, where the Gaddafi state was free to torture him at will in its disgusting dungeons.

The Guardian reported that our Prime Minister, Theresa May ‘admitted the UK should have done more to reduce the risk that the couple could be mistreated and had wrongly missed opportunities to help them once they were held in the prisons of the then Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

‘The Prime Minister acknowledged that Britain should have realised sooner that its international allies were involved in unacceptable practices, implying criticism of Libya for torturing suspects as well as the CIA's practice of rendition.’

This is so naïve it makes Pollyanna look like Machiavelli, and would be rather sweet if it didn’t involve people being chained up, starved, hooded, wrapped in duct tape, kidnapped by operatives of the Land of the Free and crammed into secret jails, and then loaded on to unmarked aircraft for a trip to one of the world’s worst tyrannies.

There’s a little side-bar to it, as well, which I find intensely moving. I don’t have much time for John McCain in general, though (like any sentient being) I have always felt that he conducted himself with extreme courage and dignity during his nightmare captivity in North Vietnam.

Now Senator McCain is very ill and close to death. The Guardian notes : ‘This is a very live issue indeed. In Washington, Gina Haspel is currently having her confirmation hearings as Donald Trump's new CIA director. From 2002, Ms Haspel ran the secret CIA centre in Thailand where inmates were tortured and where Ms Boudchar [Belhaj’s wife, pregnant at the itme of her state-sponsored kidnap] was mistreated. Mr Trump supports torture. He wants to bring back waterboarding. John McCain, the only US senator to have actually been tortured, is fighting Ms Haspel's nomination on that basis.’

A White House aide has sneeringly remarked that Senator McCain is ‘dying anyway’ . And it looks as if PresidentTrump won’t be welcome at Senator McCain’s funeral

So this is the civilised West at work, and with that a background, a certain Andrew Parker, Director-General of the British Security Service( known to many as MI5) has made a pious speech in Berlin.

Let ,me get something straight here. Aided by the TV series ‘Spooks’, the BSS has got itself a glamorous toughie reputation, and many people refer to it as a spy service. It is not. It has no espionage duties.

In fact the only accurate generic name for such an organisation, especially given the huge budgets, status and immunity form scrutiny which it enjoys these days, is that it is a form of Secret Police agency . True, it so far lacks powers of arrest. But, following the granting of such powers to civil servants (a major breach of an ancient rule) in the ‘National Crime Agency’, it cannot be long before this line is crossed.

As usual when the principles of English liberty are being raped or tossed lightly aside, few realise the significance of the granting of powers of arrest to civil servants. Civil servants are under the direct authority of government, and of ministers.

Police officers are not and have never been civil servants. They are sworn constables, whose duty is to *the law*, which they have sworn an oath to uphold without fear or favour, and not to the state itself. This position gives them the freedom, and indeed the duty, to refuse an unlawful order from a technical superior. Their local nature also helps them to resist central government pressure ( though they are nothing like as local as they should be, or as they were before the Jenkins-imposed mergers of 1967) - though the Ministry of Defence Police, the British Nuclear Police and the British Transport Police are national bodies perhaps more subject to Whitehall than they should be.

My own nightmare is the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 (read it some time), an emergency powers law so extensive that the government of the day can, if it wishes, turn this country into a sort of dictatorship in a matter of hours. So forgive me if I am not a great enthusiast for MI5. And forgive me if I am sceptical about its frequent, uncheckable claims to have thwarted terror plots. If I had a budget that big, was treated with similar reverence as that accorded to MI5, and was that well-screened from scrutiny, I too might be inclined to make boasts about how good I was at my job. Who could gainsay me? But now Mr Parker has gone to Berlin to make a well-trailed speech (front page of the semi-official newspaper ‘The Times’ and all over the BBC this morning), warning Russia that its behaviour, notably over the Skripals, might make it even more of a pariah.

Well, no doubt, but I am tempted to say ‘What about the Belhaj case (and what about the Trump administration’s view of torture and its chosen candidate to head the CIA?). It doesn’t seem to me that a muted apology in the Commons and a cheque for Mr Belhaj’s wronged wife really suggest that we have cleaned out the stables. Does that not make Britain and the USA pariahs too, and if not, why not?

And then let us note the arrival in London of Mr Recep Tayip Erdogan, President of Turkey, whose sinister nature has many times been discussed in this blog, and whose rapidly darkening country I have twice visited to document this. Mr Erdogan has in recent months turned what was a fairly free and law-governed country into a despotism. The prisons are full of journalists. The courts are lawless instruments of state power. Independent newspapers and broadcasters have been terrified into submission. Mr Erdogan is gathering all the power in Turkey into his person, and creating an executive presidency at least as menacing to a free society as Vladimir Putin’s.

His foreign policy is also highly dangerous, and is causing grave friction in Syria. Oh, and Turkey still occupies North Cyprus, which it invaded in July 1974 in an action which is an extraordinarily close diplomatic and political parallel to Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.

Yet Mr Erdogan is not called a pariah, and is to be welcomed at Downing Street and given tea with the Queen (as well as offered excellent deals on military equipment), photo opportunities and developments which will help him , in a rapidly approaching election, to consolidate his despotic power.

So, Mr Parker, What About That? What about Mr Belhaj? And What About Mr Erdogan? Is your wrath at Russia genuine? If it is, why do you not feel it for those who took part in the sordid kidnapping and rendition of Mr Belhaj, and who defend or excuse torture as an instrument of the state? And why do you not make speeches in Berlin (or come to that in Birmingham or Basildon), attacking Turkey?

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Contributor Tony Dodd, whom I thank for kindly replying, wrote of a change in our colloquial styles:

"I think "Well", like "Oh" or "Er", is less annoying as these words essentially mean nothing and are just a way of drawing breath as it were, in preparation to speak. But "So" has the meaning of "Therefore" or "Consequently", and suggests that what follows flows directly from the question."

Your description of adverbs like "well", "oh" and "er" as "just a way of drawing breath as it were, in preparation to speak" was a very nice and apt touch, sir.
I agree that "so" often tends to suggest the meanings "therefore" or "consequently" and, as you say, "suggests that what follows flows directly from the question" but would you not agree that for that very reason "so" is logically, at least rather more appropriate in those contexts than the time-honoured "well"?
It may reasonably, I suggest, be taken as meaning "since you ask, therefore I reply as follows".
It is true, of course, that we - or at least I - am much more used to hearing "well" in such a context but I don't actually detect in "well" a similar reference back to the question before beginning to reply. If there is one and I have missed it, perhaps you or some other kind reader might let me know how "well" does acknowledge the question, if it does.

Peter Preston raises the irritating but now very common usage of "So," to begin an answer.
I think "Well", like "Oh" or "Er", is less annoying as these words essentially mean nothing and are just a way of drawing breath as it were, in preparation to speak.
But "So" has the meaning of "Therefore" or "Consequently", and suggests that what follows flows directly from the question.
I hope this trend sinks into disuse.

From the themes listed next to the number of contributions at the end of Mr Hitchens' article I see that one of the themes is "Language" and so I wonder whether other readers have noticed a subtle change in how some people, having been asked a question, tend nowadays colloquially to introduce their answer not by the time-honoured adverb "well" but instead by "so".
An example might, for example, be:
(1) Q: Where are you going on holiday this year?
A: Well, I haven't given it much thought yet.

(2) Q: Where are you going on holiday this year?
A: So, I haven't given it much thought yet.

The "so" seems to be establishing itself now as a replacement for the "well". Both adverbs are, of course, at least equally appropriate but "well" has certainly had a good run over many decades in colloquial speech and may yet prevail over competitors. Time will tell.

Just thought I'd mention it, as all this political theorising can get a bit oppressive after a while.

Correction. That should be '...he speculates that the belief that American blacks 'are the relentless victims of relentless white racism, all the time, everywhere, for no reason at all and that explains everything' is encouraging this violence."

I always considered 'whataboutery' a fair form of argument and was surprised to learn (on this weblog) that some found fault with it.

I was interested to read here that PH considers American treatment of its black citizens to be still to some extent unsatisfactory. He has touched on this before based on his time living there. The American journalist Colin Flaherty (author of White Girl Bleed A Lot and Don't Make The Black Kids Angry) has documented the extraordinary disproportion of black crime in that country, not only within the African-American community but black on white violent crime ('white' meaning all ethnic groups except for African descent). He claims that the problem, already intolerable, is getting worse. Although his main concern is in establishing that this is a fact and that the media go to extraordinary lengths to 'ignore, deny, condone, excuse, encourage and even lie' about it, he speculates that the persistence of white racism is exacerbating this violence.

I would be interested in hearing PH's views on this subject at some stage.

We may not be in possession of "all the facts" but we do retain some instinct which informs us when we are being lied to. I watched Mr Parker and I knew that I was being lied to. No matter how well rehearsed the noises that these creatures make, we know that they are being operated by hands unseen and motivated by an agenda unstated and unpublished.

The world seems to be going slightly bonkers... and it's not helped by so many people saying what they do NOT mean and NOT meaning what they say. It would probably be a massive relief if someone would simply say... we're going down this road because it will result in this much gold being poured into these people's pockets.

Posted by: Tony Foreman | 16 May 2018 at 02:12 PM **What if it had tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries here,......** Not What If? They are already here - sitting waiting in the communities right across this country.

I think it is also helpful to imagine the tables being turned, eg between Syria and Britain, or wherever - it is widely applicable - whatifery.

Apparently Daish al Islam had 40,000 fighters in Douma who were from 80 different countries. And, according to Erdogan the US sent 5,000 truck loads and 2,000 cargo planes’ worth of weapons to Syria. What if Syria had aims of regime change for Britain and had it’s Special Forces in the Lake District and Kent, etc? What if it had tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries here, all armed to the teeth, and having visited out-and-out destruction on the country; and meanwhile the Syrians were all sitting at home watching their version of Hard Talk or Question Time, and discussing what should be done in Britain (as if it were their God-given right) and with the ten million British refugees.

***PH writes: I addressed this precise problem in my MoS column of 2nd June 2013, thus:

'What we do to Syria may one day be done to us
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Imagine this: Newspapers and broadcasters in China suddenly start to denounce the British government. They call it a ‘regime’. They say that its treatment of its Muslim minority is cruel and unjust.

Soon, their views are echoed by the Chinese Foreign Minister, who in a speech at the United Nations says that Britain’s treatment of its minorities is a disgrace, and calls for sanctions against this country.

The Chinese ambassador turns up as an ‘observer’ at an Islamist demonstration in Birmingham. Some protestors are injured. Carefully-edited footage of the occasion is shown on global TV stations, in which the police are made to look brutal and the provocations against them are not shown.

Soon after this, armed attacks are made on police stations and on army barracks. People begin to notice the presence in British cities of foreign-looking men, sometimes armed.

In a matter of months, the country is plunged into a civil war. A place known for stability, order and prosperity descends with amazing speed into a violent, rubble-strewn chaos, complete with refugees, plumes of oily smoke and soup-kitchens. The bewildered inhabitants shrug with hopeless bafflement when they read foreign accounts of events, encouraging the rebels, even though nobody really knows who they are. They just long for the fighting to be over.

All the time, foreign media report in a wholly one-sided way, credulously trumpeting British government ‘atrocities’ without verification.

And then all the major countries in the world agree to permit the direct supply of weapons to the rebels.

Absurd? Wait and see. Something quite like this actually happened on a small scale in Northern Ireland, where American individuals helped buy guns and bombs for the IRA, and the US government put huge pressure on us to give in to the terrorists.

And China, on the verge of becoming a global power, is watching carefully all the precedents we set, in Yugoslavia, in Iraq and now in Syria.

I apologise to the real Chinese ambassador for inventing this particular story. But the events I imagine here are based on the actual behaviour of Western powers in Syria. And what nations do to others is usually, in the end, done to them in turn.

I do not like the Syrian government. Why should I? It is not much different from most Middle-Eastern nations, in that it stays in power by fear. The same is true of countries we support, such as Saudi Arabia, recently honoured with a lengthy visit by Prince Charles. In fact Saudi Arabia is so repressive that it makes Assad’s Syria look like Switzerland. And don’t forget the places we liberated earlier, which are now sinks of violence and chaos – Iraq, Libya,

*****

So many high ideals, so much misery and destruction. My old foe Mehdi Hasan (who understands the Muslim world better than most British journalists) rightly pointed out on ‘Question Time’ on Thursday that our policy of backing the Syrian rebels is clinically mad.

These are the very same Islamists against whom – if they are on British soil - government ministers posture and froth, demanding that they are deported, silenced, put under surveillance and the rest.

But when we meet the same people in Syria, we want to give them advanced weapons. One of these ‘activists’, a gentleman called Abu Sakkar, recently publicly sank his teeth into the bleeding heart of a freshly-slain government soldier.

I confess that I used to think highly of William Hague. I now freely admit that I was hopelessly wrong. The man has no judgement, no common sense, and is one of the worst Foreign Secretaries we have ever had, which is saying something.

His policies –disgracefully egged on by a BBC that has lost all sense of impartiality - are crazily creating war where there was peace.

Syria for all its faults was the last place in the region where Arab Christians were safe. Now it never will be again. Who benefits from this? Not Britain, for certain.

Now, his strange zeal for lifting the EU arms embargo has caused Moscow to promise a delivery of advanced anti-aircraft missiles to Syria. Israel has threatened to destroy them if deployed. Syria has said it will respond with force.

This is exactly how major wars start. Mr Hague is not just pouring petrol into a blazing house full of screaming people. He is hurling high explosives in as well.

It may even be that some people actually want such a war, with Iran as its true target. They know that ‘weapons of mass destruction’ will not work again as propaganda. So they claim to be fighting for ‘democracy’ in Syria.

It is a grisly lie. Unless this stupidity is brought to an end, the world may be about to take another major step down the stairway that leads to barbarism.

This business is now so urgent that I beg you to ask your MPs what they propose to do to halt this wilful slither into a war almost nobody wants, and which could easily ruin the civilised world.'
*****

One reason for Mr Erdogan's visit is the suspension of part of the Ankara Agreement, namely the part which allowed Turks who established businesses in the UK to gain UK citizenship. Mr Erdogan, who knows that UK companies are interested in Turkey (cheap labour, lax enforcement of labour laws in some sectors), suggests a closer relationship than that envisaged by the Ankara Agreement.

In war there is no level playing field and contemporary journalists should know this more than others. Hardened establishments will employ any tactic to deliver severe blows at their enemies while appearing moralistic when it comes to their home populations. Gosh, the US's representative at the UN would pull out a revolver and shoot the representatives of Russia, Iran, Syria and any other state daring to challenge American exceptionalism if she knew she would get away with it!

The UK has for a long time ceased to care about the peoples of most of the world. She was content to lose herself inside the EC bureaucratic labyrinth but for the surprise intervention of Englishmen and women at the referendum to withdraw. Now, she is having to revisit the world, look strong and take sides in any global conflict where she sees an advantage. And her citizens are expected to give dutiful support without question when dealing with other countries. They are denied the luxury of being dispassionate observers.

I read this about Turkish Journalists & others .
***With Turkey’s judiciary depleted and intimidated by waves of purges orchestrated by Mr Erdogan’s government, such Kafkaesque outcomes are increasingly common. In another recent case, the head of the local chapter of Amnesty International, a human-rights group, who has spent the past eight months in prison, was set free by one court, only for another to rearrest him hours later. The same happened to a group of 19 imprisoned journalists last spring. (The judges responsible for their release were overruled, and placed under investigation themselves.)
But this time the implications are wider and even more serious. By defying the Alpay verdict, the government has in effect crippled the country’s top court, says Hasim Kilic, a former chief justice. “The constitutional court has been rendered inoperative,” he says.***
If the Presidents name was changed to Putin and the country to Russia , as per your article on Belhaj , I am sure you are correct , this would be all over the media .
The government & some UK journalists are very selective in their application of moral outrage .

Yet an another powerful and persuasive entry by Mr Hitchens. With regards to the 'Civil Contingencies Act of 2004', am I correct in thinking that it was shortly after supplemented with the 'Legislative Regulatory Reform Bill', another sinister piece of legislation introduced by the Blair administration?

Turkey is country which controls the funnel of the bottleneck which leads from the Arab peninsula to the south. Masses of immigrants pass through and profitable industries of movement of people (destined for Europe), shipping of goods and sales of lifejackets thrive unchecked without any civilised legal controls. Also, it is known convoys of trucks with labour force go through to Syria to dismantle (cannibalise) factories of its contents machinery etc. and take it back to Turkey for their own use. This is the conduct of a rogue state which is light years away from the pomp or dignity which is about to be bestowed on its brutal leader Erdogan when he visits. (though Theresa might think that she’ll get something out of it if he puts a good word in for her with the Saudis.)

The Turkish representative on the daily politics , dismissed the questions about journalists being locked up in Turkey as a misunderstanding , on the questioners part .

***PH writes. Indeed. They are journalists. And they have been locked up on trumped-up charges. The misunderstanding lies in thinking that the British government and liberal establishment care about such things, except when it suits them to do so. ***

Slightly off the point, but an interesting aside: Erdogan's rise is almost certainly an aspect of the falling Turkish birth rate. The Kurds are outbreeding the Turks at a ferocious rate, and on present showing will be 50% of the population in 30 or so years. Erdogan is riding a wave of Turkish fear and panicky populism. I suspect there are several lessons here for the increasingly "can't be bothered with the trouble of bringing up children" Europeans.

Petey,
The following garbled sentence appears in this article:
"Aided by the TV seies ‘Spooks’, the BSS has got istelkf a glamporous toughie reputatipon"
This is the first time I have seen such a large conglomeration of typos in your column. I assume the reason for it is one of the following.
1. You are seriously off schedule and distracted (after all, your column last Sunday was very late in appearing).
2. You are attempting to avoid the attention of mechanical bots by deliberately misspelling certain key words that they might be looking for.
3. Whoever did the typing had been smoking the Wicked Weed.

***PH writes: MY thanks for the alert.I just can't type, that's all and I have no proofreader, so this sort of thing can and des slip through. I am relieved that he noticed the late appearance of the blog on Sunday. I was dismayed when I arrived home from the Midlands on Sunday evening and found that it had not been posted. But I was almost as dismayed at the absence of comments on this.****

I don't know if Mr Hitchens goes back through and edits his blog posts, but if he does, he might want to tidy up the paragraph below. I mention it not to be pedantic, but simply because the typos leap off the page and distract the reader.

'Let ,me get something straight here. Aided by the TV seies ‘Spooks’, the BSS has got istelkf a glamporous toughie reputatipon, and many people refer to it as a spy service. It is nt. It has no espionage duties.'

Thank you for this rational, informative and therefore persuasive article.
We, at least I, really need to learn how this "civilised West at work" with a critical eye.

Whataboutery is a humorous and good name of a critical, truth-searching attitude - not only Jesus but also small children sometimes make adults speechless by their sharp 'whataboutistic' questions.

However, it is also important to note and learn how 'the civilised West' (included Japan) has been uncritically relied on the information sources regarding the Syrian conflict and made significant decisions that influenced severely the lives and deaths of Syrian people.

I read the warning on this in a critical report written by Japanese professors Hiroyuki Aoyama and Hamanaka Shingo.

'We have confirmed the signs of arbitrary operation by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in their fatality statistics in both the variation of data collection mannerism and the changes in statistical figures per se.

The Syrian conflict, as has been shown by the “Arab Spring” in Arabic countries that originated it, is generally captured as a confrontation of “the long-term autocratic regime” by “democratization” and a systemic transformation has been considered a matter of course.

However, it has become acknowledged at long last in recent years that such a concept of pre-established harmony as based on the rewarding-virtue-and-punishing-vice morality *has no place in reality* as Arabic nations including Syria deepen their woes in turmoil.

That said, however, the political bias that lurks in the data supplied by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights *revitalizes an extremely simplified, stereo- typed “Arab Spring” and is hampering correct understanding of the Syrian situations*.

Data that are politically tendentious *should not essentially be referenced in any effort for grasping the true picture of the conflict reality*. The Syrian conflict, in particular, has been tainted as an “information war” that is waged through “agitative broadcasting” by satellite TV stations, the Internet and other social networking systems, propagating intelligence and influencing the course of events.

As such, neutral information and recognition of current state of affairs based on *correct data are crucial*.

As one of “the most reliable information” sources relied upon by various UN organizations and media companies in Europe and the US, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights needs to be aware of the political value attached to any and all pieces of information on the Syrian conflict that is known as the “information war”'.

What I've noticed about charges of whataboutery is that they are usually made by the amoral to try to shut down criticism of bad policies and cruelty. War's kill people, torture is not good and claiming that well when we do it, it is of a higher moral calibre than when the bad guys do it isn't very convincing. . If we have conventions against the use of torture then we should stick to them rather than trying to find ways around them by either shipping people off to be tortured elsewhere or by conveniently redefining what constitutes torture. when we do it.

Mr Hitchens will recognise this part of Edmund Burkes political writing , it seems to me , to cover the events of the years from 2003 onward very well , in Britain especially.

***vast speculative schemes of political reconstruction, were causing a devaluation of tradition and inherited values and a thoughtless destruction of the painfully acquired material and spiritual resources of society. Against all this, he appealed to the example and the virtues of the English constitution: its concern for continuity and unorganized growth; its respect for traditional wisdom and usage rather than speculative innovation, for prescriptive, rather than abstract, rights; its acceptance of a hierarchy of rank and property; its religious consecration of secular authority and recognition of the radical imperfection of all human contrivances.***

Why would a Government require an emergency powers act that is as far reaching as indicated ?
Apart from an all out War , a life or death struggle against an equivalent power , it is not required .
Mr McCain is an impressive man , with a history of service , to say that about Him , is shocking , it shows the low moral standing of some people .

Mr. Hitchens, you don't seem to be guilty of whataboutism at all as far as I can tell. Whataboutism is to *justify* one evil with reference to another. That is completely different from pointing out hypocrisy. After all, you haven't justified the wrongdoings of Assad or Putin (to the contrary).

More interestingly, it's those accusing you of whataboutism who are often committing that very fallacy by pointing to the regimes of Assad or Putin in order to defend the questionable, hypocritical nature of the status quo in foreign policy.

I agree with Peter about Senator McCain and that remark from the White House was disgusting and abhorrent. The man has stood resolutely against the pain and anguish and lasting torment caused by torture and he should be remembered for what he did to stop Gina Haspel from getting the role which she shouldn't get anywhere near.
There are many things he has done what I haven't agreed with and have been downright dangerous but he clearly has genuine empathy on this issue. I wonder if Ms Haspel would like to be water boarded and then decide if she thinks it's still acceptable

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